When your multimedia habit gets serious, likely any old budget desktop is not enough to handle all your music, photo editing, and video encoding. If you're looking to step up, the Gateway DX4300-03 ($749.99 list) offers more than entry-level multimedia PCs. It has a quad-core AMD Phenom X4 processor in it, so the system boasts a decent power-to-dollar ratio. Then again, it's not a barn-burning, knuckle-dragging multimedia ultimate weapon either. Rather, the DX4300 is a decently priced, reasonably powerful multimedia system for the hobbyist with way too many pictures and videos.

Design
The DX4300 is a nicely styled mini-tower PC with a curved front face rather than the blocky PCs that Gateway has been producing lately. Like other multimedia-oriented systems, such as the Dell Studio XPS 435 and HP Pavilion Elite systems, the DX4300 has a concave tray built in to the top surface of the system. You can place gadgets you're syncing or charging, like iPhones, iPods, or digital cameras, in the tray, along with external hard drives. All of these peripherals can be plugged in to handily available USB ports near the back of the tray or the media card slots on the front of the system. There are eight USB ports and one FireWire port to accommodate all your electronic toys.

The 1TB drive onboard should be enough to handle all the photos, videos, and music you can throw at it. It can hold more than 750,000 digital pictures and MP3s, or up to 250 DVDs' worth of movies. Other multimedia features include a digital TV tuner and a DVD burner (though a Blu-ray option would have been nice). While we were fans of TV tuners in the past, online video from sources like Hulu is rapidly making TV tuners a moot point in desktop PCs. What's more useful are the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi card (rare for a tower) and the HDMI port on the ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. Wi-Fi frees up where you can place the PC in your home, and HDMI lets you hook the system up to a large screen HDTV or flat panel monitor with just one cord.

Features
The DX4300 is fairly well equipped, so it's not surprising that there is virtually no extra space in the chassis. The memory DIMM slots are full, but 8GB should be enough for most enthusiasts. There are no open PCI or PCIe slots (graphics, modem, Wi-Fi, and TV tuner are all present), and there's only a 300W power supply, so there won't be much extra overhead to support the two free hard drive and one free optical drive bays if you decide to populate the remaining expansion spots. With this system, it's more about upgrading than adding extra components.

Since we're picking nits, a pretty big one is the prevalence of bloatware on the system. Like other Gateway PCs, the DX4300 comes with a lot of extraneous software. Office 60-day trial, shortcuts to eBay, an ad-supported version of Microsoft Works (at least Works won't self-destruct like Office, however); you name it and it's on the DX4300. The system also has a short 60-day trial subscription to Norton Internet Security. I wish PC makers would put full versions of programs on the hard drives or none at all.

Performance
The DX4300 is pretty capable as is. The system was able to finish the Windows Media Encoder test in 50 seconds and the Photoshop CS4 test in 2:22. The Photoshop score is a little slower than Intel Core 2 Quad systems like the HP Pavilion Elite e9107c-b and the Dell Inspiron 545, which both came in under two minutes, but the WME score is decent for any quad-core system. The DX4300's Radeon HD 4650 is a budget-performance card, so it returns not quite passable scores on Crysis (35 frames per second (fps)) and World in Conflict (33 fps) at at the lower resolution (1,280-by-1,024). Both games will require a little more tweaking to get a playable score, but at least the system can do more than desktops with less capable graphics cards like the ATI Radeon HD 4350 on the HP Elite e9120f.

Compared to the multimedia-oriented HP Pavilion Elite e9107c-b, the DX4300 is a stronger overall value thanks to its better graphics, spacious hard drive, and extra features like the built-in Wi-Fi. The similarly priced HP Elite e9120f is slightly better for the multimedia enthusiast, since it comes with a Blu-ray player, something the DX4300 lacks. Our budget PC Editors' Choice, the Dell Inspiron 545, on the other hand, offers a better bang for the buck if you discount the system's non-existent 3D graphics power, and it's still a good photo- and video-editing machine. The Inspiron is the system to get if you're trying to save some money, but still need quad-core performance. Its big brother, the Dell Studio XPS 435, also holds onto its multimedia Editors' Choice for having better performance across the board. That's the system I'd get if I were in a hurry to finish my projects, though it will cost you about $1,000 more.

So the Gateway DX4300-03 ends up being the jack of all trades, master of none. It offers plenty of perks like HDMI-out, built-in Wi-Fi, and decent performance parts, but it's still stuck in the middle, better than budget systems, but not quite powerful enough to play with the big boys like the Dell Studio XPS 435. It's a decent system, don't get me wrong, but there are other choices out there that merit higher scores and better recommendations.

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